Blog Archives

Built at the corner of Forest and Hawthorn Streets in Hartford for the lawyer, John Hooker and his wife, Isabella Beecher Hooker. The original structure of 1853 was expanded into a Gothic Revival villa by architect Octavius Jordan in 1861. This was the first house built in the notable Hartford neighborhood of Nook Farm. Isabella, an important figure in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, was the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe. The house was altered in the early twentieth century when part of the roof was raised in 1906 and the porte-cochere added in 1924. Today the house is surrounded by 1950s-era apartment buildings and is itself an apartment building.